Giorgio Mustica of The Aquarian Weekly recently conducted an interview with
vocalist James LaBrie of progressive metal giants DREAM THEATER.
An excerpt from the chat follows below.
The Aquarian Weekly: Looking at the new DREAM THEATER album, what are your
thoughts on how it stacks up with the others?
LaBrie: I think it stacks up
phenomenally. The reason for that is the fact that when you hear this album,
you're going to hear that there are a lot of the core influences with DREAM
THEATER, but at the same time, just making it very relevant as to what's
going on with DREAM THEATER today — some of the things that we feel keep
us in the now with the musical context. The three focal points for me on this
album are that we finally wrote a song, the opening track, "False
Awakening Suite", which is very cinematic and movie soundtrack-like,
then you go to the middle of the album and you have this big, epic kind of
instrumental song, "The Enigma Machine", and shortly there
followed with "The Bigger Picture". So these songs really kind
of create that excitement. I mean, to me, one of the things that I looked
forward to when I was getting RUSH or listening to any band like that — YES
or anything — was when I found out that there was going to be an instrumental
track on the album. So I think that's always been a big part of who and what DREAM
THEATER is and endears us to our listeners; it just adds much more
dimension to the band. And then the end track, "The Illumination
Theory", is this big, epic 20-minute-plus, but what it does is it just
incorporates all these things that really make DREAM THEATER who they
are; it really identifies strongly with the kind of band we are. It's aggressive,
it's very symphonic at times, it's very atmospheric at times. This is the first
time where in the middle of an instrumental, we didn't all of a sudden go into
this big, interactive display of musical and instrumental prowess. What
happened was the whole thing just kind of disappears — the whole band
disappears — and all of a sudden Jordan [Rudess, keyboards] comes
in with this big, atmospheric approach, followed by a very symphonic string
section, very melodically driven, and then going into something that feels like
a meteorite hit the planet, you know, if you go into the section called "The
Pursuit Of Truth", where I'm like, screaming my head off and
everything like that. I mean, it's a very exciting ride and it's a classic,
epic piece for DREAM THEATER. So this album, just with those three key
points that I pointed out, really make it something that I think is very, very
suggestive that the band is feeling that we've arrived at a new place and we're
walking through a door that kind of creates the next chapter for us, so to
speak. And that's not to take away from the other songs; I think the other
songs are very powerful within themselves, so that's where I'm coming from.
Yeah, it's a great album.
The Aquarian Weekly: There hasn't been an instrumental track on a full-length since
2003's "Train Of Thought", and there's not one but two
instrumentals on this CD. You were trying to make this more theatric, right?
LaBrie: Yeah, I mean, before
going into the album, we knew that it was going to be a self-titled album just
because we felt that we just walked over a bridge, so to speak. With "A
Dramatic Turn Of Events", that album was more or less about us letting
everyone know that we are still the same band and we're going to continue to
write music and not lose our identity, but the music is going to be where it's
at, that we haven't lost a thing; if anything, we feel better about ourselves.
So that album was more or less about proving it to our fans and to the
journalists around the world that we still are who we are and in fact, we feel
even that much more confidant. So with that being done, this album was more or
less about us just remembering and saying, "You know what, we've done
that, we've proven that, let's just get back into having a great time together
and writing an amazing album and that we can say this is the beginning of
something new for us." This is a whole new chapter in DREAM THEATER's
career that we feel this album will be the kick-start to that. So yeah, going
in we just knew this was the album we needed to write, and I think we achieved
it.
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